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A Mug a Marauder Could Love [1]
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Date: 2023-08-29
Talk about the eye of the beholder. Dazzled by Donald Trump’s penal pic, Fox’s Jesse “Troubled” Watters coos that the oft-indicted Former Guy “looks good...and looks hard.”
I’d love to be able to agree with him (for once). But here’s what I see. On the right side of Trump’s collar, a flap of jowl spills. It looks about as “hard” as barnyard wattle. Safe to say, were he wearing a crew neck, one might picture him being ‘pardoned’ for Thanksgiving.
Granted, his eyes look fierce enough to confirm his vow to non-bobbleheads to be “coming after you….to do things that have never been done [to anyone] before.”
Wow! Never before? As in, worse than medieval torture devices? (Yikes.)
Scoff if you must. Count him out as you wish. But his past suggests we misunderestimate his resilience and tenacity at our peril.
Case in point. Starting ten years ago, he faced a seven-figure civil action. In what looked to be a foregone conclusion, some 65 equity-holding members of a Florida country club sued him for effectively expropriating their equity into his own deep pockets.
Their counsel, Brad Edwards, saw the case as “impossible to lose” (quoting sports-screen-book-writer Rick Reilly’s 2019 tour-de-course Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump). So. Rather than prolong the fuss, Big Blonder coughed up the cash he owed and moved on, right?
Nope. Like a cornered teenage mutant Ninja badger, he fought the plaintiffs, common sense, and anything else within light years of the truth to a fare-thee-well. When he lost, he appealed. Only when he lost again and saw no way forward could the fleeced pry one red cent from his Mammon-centric clutches.
So. What was up with Trump denying and delaying the obvious and the inevitable? Well, Edwards tells Reilly, Trump is ever “a fighter who’s gonna fight to the bitter end no matter what. You don’t just have to beat him, you have to beat him three or four times.
“YOU HAVE TO KEEP BEATING HIM EVEN AS HE’S LAYING ON THE GROUND BECAUSE [IF YOU DON’T] HE’LL GET UP AND FIGHT SOME MORE. THE GUY WILL NEVER, EVER QUIT.” (Emphasis added.)
Granted, his ‘weighty’ scowl may not evince fighting trim. Trouble is, he’s not alone. Don’t look now, but he’s conned a malign, facts-averse cult into sanctifying (if not deifying) his every syllable. Given pliant Dems and mincing media, he, his cronies, and his surrogates have convinced millions that our country’s sole non-despotic major party is a hive of pedophilic cannibals. Sigh. According to National Magazine Award laureate Jeff Sharlet’s current book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, scads of Donnie’s devotees believe a secret, faith-based, ever-Trumpy force has snuffed Hillary Clinton- and that, when the self-styled “Chosen One” gives the Word, Civil War II shall commence.
To that end, Trump’s chum Nick “Forget the Constitution” Fuentes calls him “America’s rightful king.” Surrogate Ginni Thomas snorts “There are no rules in war.” Frat boy writ YUGE Matt Gaetz screams for more J6-like “force.” The resurgent, ever-vapid Sarah Palin effectively foments (what else?) “civil war.”
All wars are holy wars. Some of them (notably our Civil War) may look to bode some jolly good fun- until they don’t. At length, all of them fall under William T. Sherman’s concise, omnibus definition: “hell.”
Like it or not, report it or not, Trump’s mugshot radiates warlike Wrath. Doing so, it reinforces his recent, bellicose spiel to CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland. There, he vowed to smite his foes in an unmistakably Biblical “Final Battle” that would wreak evidently divine “retribution” (not to say revenge).
‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith The Donald. In all, the camera shot seen ‘round the world can be apprehended (pun intended) as a wanted poster for America’s still at large, still unhinged, still untethered all-time Public Enemy Number One.
If we take his long overdue, risibly regal (replete with 40-vehicle motorcade!) flop in Fulton as something like his Waterloo, we won’t stand much chance of stopping him. If anyone ever could aptly-and-ominously parrot the (apocryphal) John Paul Jones gem of defiance “I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT!,” it must be the guy who, for EIGHT YEARS has followed (to a ‘T’) what scholar/pundit/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat has called “the strongman’s playbook.”
As J6 and much else prove, he’s not on our country’s side. Better late than never, can we acknowledge such truth to be self-evident- and make bold to deal with it?
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